


don't wait for the storm (to pass)

by sweaters (cuimhl)



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Growing Up, M/M, Mythology - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-01-19
Packaged: 2018-05-14 22:01:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5760478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuimhl/pseuds/sweaters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Hinata dreams about thunderbirds and Kageyama is the weird birdman next door who lends him books about eagle stones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	don't wait for the storm (to pass)

**Author's Note:**

> taking a break from _late nights_ which will be updated soon! this idea took form in the meantime and I wanted to write it. I know a very negligible amount about North American mythology in general, let alone thunderbirds and eagle stones, though (and most of it's all just mentioned in passing), so I'm sorry!
> 
> also please forgive me if I've been a bit lax plot-wise, feel free to point out any inconsistencies or issues. let me know what you think!

 

For as long as Hinata can remember, there has been the burgeoning growth of longing inside his chest. It grows and grows, sure and true as the leaves that throw dappled shadows over his skin and sunlight that is as familiar to him as breathing. 

From birth, he has been given far more sunshine than any other person. It exists with him as one in his name, in his every stumbling step that moved to running and then to chasing sunsets, outstretched palm growing cold as shadows crept around him and tried to suck the sunlight out of him. Hinata knows that not even the sun can fill up the ache inside him, but he loves it for all that it gives him.

He is five, almost six, when the skies crack open in a torrential downpour and he learns not to miss the embrace of sun - instead, he dances in the rain. The water soothes his skin and cools the pace of living inside his bones, and his insides swill with something verging on whole and true. He is still drinking in the dust and petrichor, soaked through and smiling so hard that his cheeks hurt as his parents guide him back inside with worried reprimands.

“Shouyou, you’re going to catch a cold!”

“But the rain, the rain spoke! I felt so warm and full.”

At first, he misses the rain. When the sun comes out to dry the dampness and kiss his skin, he takes a step in between, desperate hands clutching for the best of both worlds.

The very first memory that he has of thunderstorms is a warm night, his seventh summer when the cicadas sing in the grass and he sits inside, watching the sky grow dismal and dark. He recalls the first distant rumble of thunder with the wild leap in his heart, the sickening drop of his stomach. It sounds like the wheels of an ancient wagon cranking its way up a rocky slope, demanding attention, and his soul awakens from its seven-year slumber that feels so much longer than that.

Hinata Shouyou falls in love with thunderstorms from that point on. The gaping emptiness that rain and sunshine failed to bridge completely, fills up, right to the brim, and Hinata is no longer a vessel of sunlight but one of all different kinds of weather. Best of them all are thunderstorms, with the grumbling roar of thunder and jagged lines of lightning that cleave the sky in two.

A year later, when the skies grow yellow and sulphurous and the air hangs heavy against his skin, a man moves into the vacant house next door. 

He doesn’t introduce himself. 

The storm passes.  
  


-

 

The next one comes when Hinata is in class, and he instantly races out to taste the dust and flame of lightning, wanting to catch the light on his arms like he’s seen firebreathers swallow their torches. His teacher scolds him all the while dragging him inside, and in the midst of flailing his arms uselessly trying to get away, he catches sight of a lone figure standing at the school gates. Hinata swears that the lightning strikes him - but the light is over in a flash and the man is gone.  
  


-  
  


“My name is Kageyama Tobio,” their enigmatic neighbour introduces himself in the pouring rain, and he doesn’t smile. It’s the first time Hinata has actually seen him, and the first time his parents have too.

“Did you see the feathers on his face?” he asks when the man has left, seemingly unbothered by the deluge.

“What feathers? Hush,” his mother swats the back of his head teasingly. His father didn’t see it either, but Hinata swears there were dark feathers on either side of the man’s cheeks, receding into the hood of his jacket. He is determined to get a closer look.  
  


-  
  


Hinata dreams of birds and thunder and the man next-door, and somehow they all merge into one.  
  


-

 

In the summer, he camps in the backyard with his comics for company, and wakes the next morning with a dozen mosquito bites on his arms and legs.

The night after, for Hinata is adamant that he will not be frightened off by a race of pesky insects, a storm brews on the horizon. The camping plans are cancelled and he is not allowed outside - “Honestly, Shouyou, you’ll get sick!”

Lightning strikes a tree two houses down, and the next morning, there are pitch-black feathers scattered around it. The tree has split in two, but it didn’t catch fire.

“The birdman swallowed the flame,” Hinata recounts to his avid listeners at school, “Just like firebreathers! He flapped his huge black wings and saved us.”

He get sent to the principal’s office when a girl starts crying.  
  


-  
  


Hinata takes to knocking on his neighbour’s door twice a week after his tenth birthday, but no one ever answers.

(At night, sometimes when salt sticks to the back of his neck in perspiration and sometimes when he has the covers wrenched up to his chin, he dreams of other things - huge, mammoth shadows coursing through the sky, their cries as haunting as they are beautiful. The dam inside him threatens to burst at the seams, longing for a sight of the mournful beings he has never seen, desperate for something he’s never known, but he always wakes before the end. That’s alright, too. He’s sure that the right things will come at the right time.)  
  


-  
  


In junior high, he starts to play volleyball. It’s not a decision he can explain to himself, but he knows it’s the right one.

Hinata knows for  _ sure _ when a boy on his team makes a hurried, accidental toss, and he chases it into the sky that opens up above the net. He loses himself, breathless, in the sight of the opposite court, vast and golden as it is constricted.

He wants more, more, more. He chooses his high school for the volleyball program, too.

 

-

 

“Your umbrella,” the man waves a black stick at him when he turns. Hinata instantly recognises him as the man from next door, and he’s certain that he hasn’t aged a day since the last time he saw him.

It takes a moment for the statement to register in his shock, but Hinata bursts into a sunny smile. “That’s fine, today is going to be a clear day. The weather broadcast said so.”

“Your umbrella,” the man repeats, jabbing it towards him, and he takes it in consternation.

“I really won’t need it,” Hinata says slowly, fingers clutching at the rustling black fabric. It’s definitely not an umbrella he’s ever seen, and even the texture is different to the umbrellas sold in the supermarket.

The man shakes his head like he’s too slow to understand. “Storm,” he explains shortly, before turning on his heel and walking away.

“Thanks,” he calls uncertainly after him, and one moment he’s there in the distance, and the next he has vanished despite there being no turns or intersections ahead.

Hinata is sitting inside the classroom for his last lesson of the day when the heavens open up and water slashes at the windows, drowning out the sound of the teacher’s voice. He stands in his excitement, watching rivulets of water slip and slide over the glass - he has a window seat - and his classmates join him.

The principal makes an announcement about contacting parents and solutions to deal with inclement weather, but Hinata hears none of it. He is waiting, and everyone holds their breath until -

_ Tap-tap-tap. _

-the rain stops and thunder shakes the ground beneath their feet. 

“Earthquake,” someone whispers, but it’s not.

It storms.  
  


-  
  


On Thursday, Hinata knocks on the heavy black door for the umpteenth time, holding the black umbrella at his side.

The door opens.

He goes inside.  
  


-  
  


“What’s this?” Hinata likes to poke and prod at the curious odds and ends in Kageyama’s house, and his curiousity doesn’t abate even at the eleventh visit.

“Stop,” Kageyama calls from somewhere inside the house, sounding nervous.

Over time, Hinata has learned that the strange man’s taciturn manner and aura of mystery are simply antecedents to his social awkwardness, which he discovers in bits and pieces. It’s like the first time Kageyama brews them tea, and burns himself with the hot water, and instead of wiping it away like any normal person would, he flushes a dark red and ushers his bewildered guest out of the house, closing the door firmly behind him.

Hinata offers to pour the tea from then on, and Kageyama doesn’t argue.

However, Hinata has yet to see the feathers again - not that he’s lost hope. In fact, their absence only serves, in some abstract way, to harden his certainty that they exist.

 

-

 

(The birds are more frightening in his next dream, freewheeling about the sky, still cawing in their harsh tongue. This time, Hinata is asleep as dawn steals over him, and it manifests in the finest tint of light at the edge of the birds’ beaks and wings and bellies. He marvels at the sleekness of their feathers, as well as the sentient way with which their eyes regard him. Slowly, as one, three birds land, perched on their massive talons. They creep towards him and tentatively, he reaches out to touch them.)

Hinata wakes.  
  


-  
  


“You dream,” Kageyama says suddenly, one afternoon. Hinata is doing his homework on the antique coffee table in the centre of the room, sunshine enveloping him in a cocoon of bliss. It always feels safe and yet unnaturally quiet inside his house, but Hinata doesn’t mind.

“I do,” he replies without thinking, and then pauses to reflect. “I do,” he whispers again, and whips around to look at the man sitting behind him on the couch.

“What do they mean?”

“What do you want them to mean?”

Hinata shrinks back at the speedy counter, thinking. He thinks of the longing that threatened to eat him alive when he had only sunshine, and then of the fullness that rain brought to him that swilled around in his insides and barely licked the edge of his soul.

Then he thinks of storms, the roars and crashes and snaps of light so bright that the world would disappear for a split second.

He looks at Kageyama, and sunlight illuminates his silhouette. His face is completely in shadow. Still, Hinata doesn’t need the light to know that there are ebony feathers on either side of his face, pristine shadow that meanders down his jawline and disappears under the neckline of his sweater.

“I-I don’t know,” he replies, honestly at a loss.

Kageyama lends him a book, and the title is in a language that he has never seen before. The first page is a dead giveaway, however, inked with a behemoth of a bird, head raised to the sky.

When he asks his father about the birds that bring storms with them, his father says contemplatively, “Thunderbirds.”

Hinata reads the book first by devouring it in the full glory of its strange script, and then he thinks to find a translator or a site on the internet about ancient languages. It’s a North American myth, he learns, and contrary to what he’d thought, it’s actually about eagle stones more than thunderbirds. Instead of sleeping, he reads for the whole night.  
  


-  
  


One night, when Hinata is fifteen-going-on-sixteen, he chances a glance outside his window somewhere between midnight and dawn, bleary-eyed and woken up by some small noise or another.

Under the silvery light of the moon, a figure troops into the house next door, and Hinata makes out the shape of a wing hanging heaving behind him.

The next morning, he isn’t sure if what he’s seen is a dream or not, but Kageyama doesn’t answer the door that afternoon.  
  


-  
  


When Hinata turns seventeen, he’s surprised by the passage of time that has evaded him in its swiftness. After a warm family dinner and a bundle of presents - a new game for his console, two books - he tells them that he’s going to study with his friend, and bids a hasty goodbye.

Only he doesn’t, and he goes to Kageyama’s house instead.

They sip tea and play chess, and they’re both equally inept at it. After two games, Hinata sighs and asks if Kageyama has some more books. He does, and they read to each other, as outdated as it sounds.

Kageyama reads him passages from an ancient tome full of North American fables, and Hinata stumbles his way through two pages of an English novel until he gives up and listens, head resting on his hands, to Kageyama.

The man has a nice voice, not deep or resonant but slightly dry, sarcastic, inviting.

Hinata falls asleep, and he spends his first night at the birdman’s house in a wooden rocking chair, draped with a thin blanket. He dreams of thunderbirds, shrieking and flapping their huge wings, each flap followed by a resounding roll of thunder. He also dreams of Kageyama, black feathers covering each arm as he leaps into the sky, instantly transforming into just another of the flock of birds circling overhead.

When he wakes, he is safe and sound in his own bed back in his house, and Kageyama is nowhere to be seen.  
  


-  
  


In his eighteenth year, his volleyball team is eliminated in the prefectural tournaments and Hinata knocks on Kageyama’s door instead of his own.

When it opens, he throws his arms around the man’s neck and starts to cry, shedding the tears he that he held back in front of his teammates, because it felt inexplicably wrong to be crying in their presence. He has pride to uphold, but more than that, it felt like empty consolation to have his underclassmen pat him on the back and promise him that they would win the next year, and make him proud.

Kageyama holds him like a fractured china doll, unsure of where to put his hands, but he finally settles them around Hinata’s back and he cries harder. He doesn’t complain even though Hinata can feel his tears soaking into his sweater, even though Hinata’s much heavier than he looks, even though they’ve never touched like this before.

Gently, Kageyama dabs with his thumb at the tears streaming down Hinata’s face, and smiles. It’s an awkward expression, flimsy and cracked and anxious, but it’s beautiful and Hinata gives it back tenfold.

“You’ll fly yet,” Kageyama tells him seriously, and Hinata believes him.  
  


-

 

He decides to go to college in Tokyo, which isn’t that far away, but it’s pretty far. Hinata looks at himself in the mirror, and touches his face with nervous fingers, awed at the transformation that’s been taking place over the years. Inevitably, he remembers Kageyama, still as youthful and as sombre as he was that day in the pouring rain when he introduced himself to the Hinata household.

The day before he has to leave, Hinata wraps up his favourite bird figurine, which is slightly worn and worse for wear but heartfelt like nothing else is. He knocks on Kageyama’s door, hand suddenly sweaty and nervous.

When Kageyama opens it, Hinata shoves the gift at him and makes to run away. Kageyama catches him by the wrist and says, quietly, “Thank you.”

Then, he implores him to wait, and goes inside the house to fetch a cardboard-bound book. Hinata opens it, for he cannot possibly force himself to obey social niceties and open it in the privacy of his own home, and gasps.

Inside are photos, countless photos of Hinata, from around eight-years-old to the present. They are all candid ones of him pouting and smiling and pulling faces, doused in sunshine. 

“I have a camera,” Kageyama shrugs in response to Hinata’s incredulous look.

“But,” Hinata splutters, “Ever since you moved in?”

“You have lots of expressions,” Kageyama hedges defensively, blushing slightly. “I’d never seen someone who made so many different faces and yet stayed the same person inside.”

Hinata hugs him as tightly as he can.  
  


-  
  


For two consecutive winters, Hinata returns home for break and stays for weeks, but he doesn’t go to see Kageyama. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he is afraid - afraid that while he’s been growing up and changing both physically and mentally, Kageyama is still the same, and that time will cause their paths to diverge. 

He doesn’t dream about thunderbirds anymore, and the loss of their presence in his life is jarring. No one ever told him that growing up was just a euphemism for goodbye, much less for a constant tug-of-war between loss and gain. Hinata doesn’t think that it was all worth it.  
  


-  
  


The third year, there is a  _ For Sale  _ sign outside the house next to theirs, and his heart shatters. In the windows, the curtains are drawn and the plants outside are overgrown, rampant and wild.

“I thought the man had already moved out years ago,” his mother remarks when Hinata asks how long the sign has been up for.

“We haven’t seen him,” his father agrees.

“Can you help me with my maths homework?” his sister pipes up, and Hinata drops the subject.

That night, snow blankets the streets in white, though it’s thankfully stopped falling. He misses the summer. 

Wrapped up in two scarves and a thick overcoat, Hinata lets himself out of the house quietly and troops down the front stairs, breath frosting before him. Everyone is asleep, two hours past midnight, but he’s spent the past half hour tossing and turning every which way.

It’s closure, he reasons to himself. He needs to know that the past is fully locked behind him before he can move on.

The walk to the neighbouring front door is far too short, and his throat constricts when he reaches it. In all these years, it hasn’t changed - perhaps the wood is a little chipped in the corner, and there are faint signs of wear on the bricks, but it’s the very same door and Hinata is not the same person anymore.

He can’t even remember how long it’s been since the last storm. He’s growing concave with the emptiness left behind, unable at all to be filled with frat parties and dating endeavours in college, none of which he looks forward to as much as the next rain or a forecast of thunderstorms.

Even the book about thunderbirds has been lost somewhere during his multiple moves from home to the college boarding house, from room to room. 

Hinata knocks, three heavy raps against the door, and it doesn’t open.

Until it does.

Kageyama stares back at him inside the house, and has he always been this young? He looks around Hinata’s age, though that couldn’t possibly be true because the man in his memory is at least in his early thirties. Perhaps that is the distortion of time.

“Hello,” Hinata breaks the silence awkwardly, fiddling with the tassels of his scarf. “It’s, uh, nice to see you.”

His gaze skitters away from Kageyama’s when there’s no answer, dancing haphazardly around at the walls of the house, the street, the moon.

“Can I come in? It’s kind of cold out here.”

Wordlessly, Kageyama moves aside and Hinata slowly walks in, stamping his feet on the mat outside and kicking off his shoes.

They sit on chairs facing each other in the lounge, and Kageyama doesn’t turn on the lights. The curtains are also left undrawn, Hinata notices, a sight not at all like the one he sees during the day.

“I guess you’ve been getting your retirement plan ready,” he jokes weakly, “I mean, selling your house and all.” Hinata laughs nervously. He fidgets in his chair, unnerved by the way that Kageyama is staring at him like a ghost, when he’s the odd one out with his feathers and fables and antique furniture.

Now twenty-one, Hinata registers the utter absurdity of the existence of birdmen amongst common population, but he doesn’t deny it. He can’t, not until he sees evidence that completely disproves it. However, sitting opposite Kageyama now, he feels like a bumbling adult trying to see fairies in the garden, deluding himself into believing that the worlds of reality and imagination can still align with the strength of willpower alone.

He was a fool to come here - how can the past be resurrected? Thunderbirds and thunderstorms and myths have all abandoned him. The longing that gaped wide its mouth in the darkness within his ribcage is shrivelling, crumbling, curling into itself in the absence of nourishment.

“I’ll go,” Hinata announces all of a sudden, and leaps to his feet. Kageyama’s eyes follow him all the way to the door, until he suddenly stands as well and goes after him.

“How have you been?”

Kageyama’s voice is brittle and a little hoarse, and it sounds like seagulls after they’ve been shrieking for food. It’s the same sound, though.

He looks at Hinata in a mixture of desperation and confusion, as though he’s suddenly found himself inserted into the situation with no context and is fighting for a breath of clarity. 

“I’ve been swell,” Hinata smiles easily. He’s better at comforting others than himself, and the confusion that he sees is enough to push his own aside.

“Classes, professors, societal expectations and all that. The grown-up world is a scary place.”

Kageyama nods slowly. It seems like the conversation is over, and after an extended silence, Hinata moves to open the front door, planning to leave.

“I’ve only been outside during the day a handful of times,” Kageyama says sudenly, out of the blue, and Hinata is taken aback.

“Are you, like, a vampire or something?” he asks incredulously, half serious and half joking.

“No,” Kageyama shakes his head furiously. “You know.”

Seemingly at will, black shadows creep their way across his skin under the glow of the moon coming from the window, and solidify into feathers.

With a sharp intake of breath, Hinata reaches out between them and rests his fingers on Kageyama’s jaw, gingerly, and touches the border between bird and man.

“Why?” he demands quietly. “Why do you let me know?”

“You already knew.”

“But it’s - aren’t you - aren’t you afraid of being found out?”

Kageyama smiles ruefully, “Who would believe it?”

“I did,” Hinata frowns. “Children would.”

“And then they grow up,” Kageyama shrugs. “You don’t dream anymore, do you?”

It’s not an accusation, but it stings. “No,” Hinata agrees a little viciously. “So then, why? I’ve grown up. Why do I believe it?”

Kageyama furrows his brow in thought, and shrugs again.

A few heartbeats later, “Stay. I have more books.”

Hinata follows him inside again.

Kageyama reads to him, and the memory of thunderbirds comes flooding back into his mind, and as the night wears on, Hinata is brutally reacquainted with the longing in his chest - it comes snapping at him, begging for more and more. He’s not wishing for storms anymore, rather for something else that doesn’t really make sense.

Dawn filters through the window, breathy and blue, and Hinata jerks awake from his drowsiness. He’s still in Kageyama’s house, and Kageyama is still reading, and he looks world-shattering, terrifyingly precious.

Hinata rises from his chair and makes his way across the carpet like in a trance, stopping in front of Kageyama. He looks up from the book, and their eyes meet.

Swallowing, Hinata leans forward. “I want to kiss you,” he blurts out, and flushes. “I mean, I want to, but if you don’t, that’s alright -”

“I want to,” Kageyama replies bluntly, and he smiles his awkward smile. “I wondered if we’d one day be the same age.”

“Can you age?” Hinata looks at him in surprise.

“I age when I’m human,” Kageyama explains. “If I don’t want to age, I have to be a bird more often.”

“So then, you waited for me?” Hinata gapes at him as understanding dawns, delighted. “Why would you do that?”

Kageyama shrugs.

“You never ended up coming to see me, though, so I decided to leave. I figured you’d moved on.”

Hinata grins guiltily. “Forgive me?”

Kageyama sighs, “Kiss me.”

Smiling, Hinata places his hands on either side of Kageyama’s face. The feathers have receded, leaving only soft skin, but he still feels more than human. He leans in until they’re breathing in the same air, and he grows aware of the way his heart pounds in his chest, his very own brand of thunder.

“You never mentioned that you like me,” Hinata whispers.

“Neither did you,” Kageyama whispers back.

“Touche.” Hinata presses his lips to Kageyamas, swallowing their matching smiles for a moment of silence that rushes through his head, quiet that explodes, crackling like lightning has bathed the world in a second of blinding white.

He pulls back for breath, “Why?”

Kageyama laughs, and it’s the first time that Hinata has heard it. There is no trace of bird in the sound - it is purely human and he falls in love with it instantly.

“You have a lot of expressions,” Kageyama kisses him back lightly. “Dumbass,” he adds as an afterthought.

“How old are you, really?”

Kageyama looks surprised by the question. “A hundred or something, I don’t remember. Maybe more.”

Hinata considers. “So. what, a hundred-year-old with successful anti-aging down pat, happened to have a crush on an eight-year-old. That sounds just a little bit illegal.”

“Nevermind the details,” Kageyama growls, and their laughter mingles in the darkness.  
  


-  
  


Hinata returns to Miyagi for job-searching, and thinks to tell his parents that he’s found his love. 

“Kageyama Tobio Junior,” he introduces to the family, but the extra touch proves unnecessary because no one remembers him.

“Thank you for taking care of our son,” his father clasps Kageyama’s hand in a macho handshake, and he visibly wilts at the enthusiasm injected into it.

“He seems like a nice boy,” his parents agree, and Hinata grins.   
  


-  
  


In the lazy mornings after he moves in with Kageyama, who has found them an apartment not too far away from his old house, Hinata likes to trace circles on Kageyama’s back.

“So you’ll grow old if you stay human?”

“Yeah.”

“You’d give up pseudo immortality for me?”

“Whatever.”

Hinata decides that it is a discussion for another morning, heavy as it is. Instead, he asks something that has been niggling at him for a while now.

“Say, will you ever change into a bird and take me flying?”

Kageyama grunts noncommittally.

“No, seriously, you could! That would be amazing!” Hinata shakes his shoulder excitedly.

“I’ll send you flying into next year if you’re volunteering to be kicked,” Kageyama replies, a little livelier.

“Stingy,” Hinata grumbles. “Will you think about it?”

After a pause, “Yeah.”

Hinata doesn’t need thunderbirds or storms, rain or shine or lightning that sets his puttering heartbeat straight. He can’t help thinking, with a wistful sigh, that all he ever needs is right here.

Kageyama turns to face him, scowling. “You’re thinking something sappy and sentimental, aren’t you?” he says accusingly.

“Yeah,” Hinata pecks him on the nose.

  
“Go get a job,” Kageyama mutters, but before he can flip over again, Hinata catches sight of his smile, and he gives it back tenfold.


End file.
